by Pete Dexter
The clock always keeps moving.
And then the buzzer goes off again, and Peter climbs between the second and third ropes, spits his mouthpiece into his glove, and sits down on the bench. He drops his head beneath his shoulders, too tired to hold it up.
Nick brings him a towel and holds it against his face.
“What are you guys, opening a blood bank?” he says.
Peter cannot talk yet; he has used himself up getting through the three rounds. Harry is on the other side of the ring, and when the buzzer goes off again he begins pounding the heavy bag.
Peter watches him a long minute, the towel covering all of his face beneath his eyes. He feels himself getting sick, but sits still, fighting it. He pulls his face away from the towel, wanting fresh air. Nick studies him from the side.
Peter goes back to the towel and blows his nose gently into it—not hard enough to make the tissue under his eyes swell. When he moves away again, the blood is running fresh over his lips. Drops of it splatter on the floor between his feet in an uneven line.
Nick crouches in front of him and begins to unlace his gloves. When he has pulled them off, it is easier to breathe, as if the wet gloves had been covering his face. His hands are lighter now, and he moves them with less effort.
He pulls his shirt over his head, and then falls back against the wall.
Nick tosses the gloves into one of the lockers, and Peter stands up and pushes the cup off his hips, and then, nauseated again, he leaves it around his feet to sit back down.
On the other side of the gym, Harry steals a look at him as he hits the bag. Nick picks up the cup and tosses it into a locker too and then nods in the direction of his son.
“He beats the hell out of me too,” he says. “I start boxing, but I can’t get mad at him, you know? It’s probably the same thing with you.”
He moves closer and studies Peter’s nose. From the front and then from the side.
He smiles, but he isn’t happy.
Peter is back the next day.
Harry stays off his face, but leaves red blotches over his chest and sides with body blows. Half a dozen times, he doubles Peter over with these shots, takes the breath out of his body and paralyzes the mechanism that breathes.
There is no blood today, but he is hurt at least as badly.
Nick watches three rounds from the ropes again, pouring water over Peter’s head between rounds to cool him off, smiling and worried.
It is like that the second day, and the third and the fourth.
On the fifth day, Harry rebreaks his nose.
Nick drives home in a six-year-old Pontiac that needs a brake job. He looks across the front seat at Harry. The kid has been strangely quiet the last week, even when they are alone. He has been strange in the gym too.
It’s not like him to punish anybody the way he is punishing Charley Flood’s kid, not even the professionals who come up once in a while and try to rough him up. After he hurts them, his punches always change—an almost indiscernible thing from outside the ring, they come with the same speed, with the same leverage, but at the very end he takes the weight off them, and they are harmless.
If there is a fault his son has in a boxing ring, it is his reluctance to hurt anybody.
“You busted him up pretty bad today,” Nick says.
Harry nods, looking out the window. He doesn’t answer.
“He ain’t good enough, you should be hurting him like that,” Nick says.
The car is quiet.
“He do something to you?” Nick says.
Harry shakes his head no.
“So that means you don’t want him around the gym?”
Nick takes a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and punches the cigarette lighter into the dashboard. A moment later it pops out, and he steadies it in front of the cigarette as he drives, the orange glow reflecting in his glasses.
“I don’t like those people,” Harry says quietly. “They ruin the gym.…”
“He can’t help who his uncle is.” Nick lights the cigarette and then looks again at Harry. “Peter ain’t like them anyway,” he says.
“So what does he want with us?” Harry says a little later.
“Something,” Nick says, “or he wouldn’t be coming back every day so you could beat him up.”
Harry looks straight ahead.
“Peter ain’t his uncle,” Nick says again.
“It’s all the same family.”
Nick nods at that. “Maybe he don’t want to be in that family,” he says.
The car goes quiet, and then Nick glances at his son again. “Trust me,” he says. “You give somebody the benefit of the doubt, someday somebody gives it to you.”
He sees Harry understands that.
“Besides,” he says, “I ain’t old enough for you to be protecting me yet.”
Peter at twenty-one:
He is naked in bed, unable to sleep, bothered by the nearness of the girl lying next to him, her arm across his chest, as if he belonged to her.
He does not know this woman well, only that she smokes and talks about clothes, even as he undressed her. He is not used to having someone in his bed overnight.
The phone rings. He turns his head to look at it, listening to the trucks outside, lining up to unload on the docks. The trucks and the wind. He picks up the alarm clock on the floor and studies the position of the hands. Four o’clock. The phone rings again and he picks it up.
“Peter?” It’s Michael.
“Yeah.”
“Something’s happened.” He is scared, Peter hears that. The woman on the bed turns in her sleep, pulling the blanket over her narrow shoulders.
Peter waits, the receiver pressed against his ear, the alarm clock rolls underneath him on the bed.
“They got Phil.”
That is what Michael calls his father now, Phil.
“Who got him?”
It is quiet a moment. “Constantine’s people,” Michael says finally. “It must of been the old guys who was still loyal. The other bunch, they loved him. He did them a favor with the old man, it’s live and let live ever since.”
Peter sits up and puts his feet on the cold floor. His apartment is on the third floor of a building 150 years old, and on winter nights he can sometimes feel the wind through the walls. He feels it now.
“Peter?”
“Yeah, I’m here.…” He stands up, holding the receiver against his ear, and goes to the radiator to turn up the heat.
“It was a bomb,” Michael says.
“Where?”
“The door. It took out most of the porch, part of the front wall.”
He reaches for the radiator and the phone falls off the table next to the bed.
It is quiet on the other end for a moment, and then he hears a noise, it could almost be a laugh. “There ain’t nothing left weighs two ounces,” Michael says. The connection is quiet again.
“It had to be Constantine’s people,” Michael says. “Phil had things worked out with the guys that took over.”
Peter is quiet, not knowing anything about the guys who took over. Only that since his uncle had killed Constantine for them, they had left the unions alone.
“I’m gonna need your help,” Michael says.
“For what?”
“If I’m going to hold on to this, I got to have somebody I can trust,” Michael says.
“I don’t know anything about the business,” he says.
“I got to have somebody I can trust,” Michael says, “or I’m as dead as Phil.”
The girl in the bed sits up, her mouth and eyes are puffy with sleep. The blanket drops into her lap. He sees the outline of small, round breasts, and between them a gold cross that hangs from a chain picks up light from the street and winks at him.
“Peter?”
“I’m thinking,” he says.
The girl begins looking for her clothes. He sees that she is angry.
“Good,” Michael says. “That’s what yo
u always been good at, figuring things out.”
She puts on her shirt and pants, and, as Peter watches, she suddenly picks her panties up off the floor and pulls them down over his face and ears.
“Peter?”
He looks up at the girl through one of the holes for her legs. She puts on her shoes and coat, and points to the telephone. “Tell her to come on over,” she says, “I’m done.” She slams the door as she leaves.
“Who’s that?” Michael says. “You got somebody there?”
“No,” Peter says, “not now.”
“So what do I do?”
Peter thinks a moment, asking himself the same question. Flesh and blood. “I’ll come over in the morning,” he says.
A warehouse in the south end of the city.
It is February.
Five men climb the fire escape to the roof, the streetlight on the corner turning the wall behind them green; Peter Flood goes up first, then his cousin Michael Flood, then two men who work for Michael—they call themselves Bobby the Jap and Monk—and then Jimmy Measles.
The steps move under the men as they climb, and Michael Flood shakes the hand railing and grabs at his cousin’s feet above him on the stairs. The men who work for Michael Flood shake the railings too and pretend to fall.
Beneath them, Jimmy Measles holds on with both hands. This is the first time he has been to the warehouse, and he is afraid of the height.
Peter Flood hears him somewhere below, his noises distinct from the others. There is something wrong with his breathing, and the bottles in his overcoat pocket make the same flat note over and over as they collide. Hundred-dollar champagne, at least that is what he’d said.
Eight feet from the top, the fire escape becomes a ladder, three single bars welded into the wall, two feet apart, another bar fastened to the roof itself. One by one the men climb this ladder, leaning forward at the top, their hands touching the roof to take the long last step.
Jimmy Measles stops on the fire escape beneath it and looks back at the ground. He takes off the new camel hair double-breasted overcoat his wife bought on Chestnut Street for his birthday, rolls it carefully around the bottles and tosses it up to Peter, who is leaning over the side.
Jimmy Measles puts his hands on the bar just over his head and steps up with one foot.
He puts his foot back on the fire escape. “This shit’s covered with ice,” he says.
To Peter Flood, it sounds as if Jimmy Measles cannot draw a full breath.
Peter sits on the edge of the roof, holding the coat, watching. He doesn’t say a word, he only waits. Jimmy Measles does not belong here.
Jimmy takes an atomizer from his pants pocket, pumps it into his mouth twice, and climbs the ladder. At the top he stalls, half on the roof, half off, his feet kicking in the air. Peter puts his fingers through his belt and lifts him the rest of the way.
It seems to Peter that he is almost weightless; that he could be hollow.
Jimmy Measles straightens himself and drapes the coat over his shoulders and walks to the middle of the roof where the others are settling in. He runs the fingers of his gloves through his long black hair, pushing it back over his ears. It falls in place naturally, and holds. Perfect hair.
Using a glove, he dusts a spot near Michael, and then slaps the glove against his trouser leg before he puts it back on, cleaning it too. He sits down carefully, careful not to wrinkle his pants, and begins to open one of the bottles.
Peter notices the shaking in his cheeks and his chin before the cork pops. He sees it again: Jimmy Measles does not belong here, he is too weak.
Jimmy hands the bottle to Michael Flood, who tastes it and hands it back.
Jimmy begins a story.
“I got this stuff from a guy owns a mom-and-pop on South Street,” he says.
The men sit quietly on the roof, waiting. This is what Jimmy Measles is for, to tell stories.
“This guy’s got a break-in once a month,” he says. “The way girls get their period, this guy’s got break-ins. He even gets depressed, that time of the month, knowing they’re coming. So at night he empties the cash register. He empties the cigarette machine, takes all the cigarettes home. He takes the meat out of his refrigerator.…”
It is quiet a moment while Jimmy Measles drinks from the bottle.
“So what do they do?” he says. “They take the fuckin’ meat slicer.”
Jimmy Measles looks at Michael, who seems to be waiting for him to finish. It comes to him that Michael doesn’t appreciate how much a meat slicer weighs.
“Those things must go a couple hundred pounds,” he says. “It’s like stealing the water heater.”
“He ought to get himself a dog,” the man called Monk says.
Jimmy shakes his head. “He had a dog; they stole it.”
He checks Michael again, to see if he’s smiling.
There is no wind on the roof.
Michael Flood carefully pulls a thin knife from a plastic bag in his lap; a drift of white powder lies across the blade. He leans forward, closing one of his nostrils with his thumb, and sniffs with the other. His eyes water and he smiles at Jimmy Measles.
“Tell us that story the lion pissed down your leg,” he says. He takes the champagne from Jimmy Measles and has a long drink.
Jimmy Measles shakes his head. “That isn’t about a lion,” he says, “it’s about my pants. Five-hundred-dollar Brooks Brothers suit, one pair of pants, the second time I wore them. Me and Larry Tock were doing a charity appearance for the circus—people called us for that shit every week back then—and so we’re standing around the lion’s cage waiting for the guy that’s supposed to pay us, and this lion, I swear to God, it pisses on me through the cage, and the piss eats a hole in my pants.”
Michael Flood smiles as the story comes out; the two men who work for him look at each other. Peter Flood is thinking of other things.
In the dark, Jimmy Measles watches Michael to see how he’s doing. “A five-hundred-dollar suit,” he says.
“I heard of elephant manure catching fire,” says the man called Bobby the Jap. He is the only high school graduate on the roof. “Spontaneous combustion …”
The other man—Monk—doesn’t understand. He pulls back two inches, as if to get Bobby the Jap in focus.
“Manure,” Bobby says. He smiles, showing gapped, uneven teeth. “It means shit.”
Monk reaches for the open bottle of champagne, tastes it, makes a face, and then opens his own bottle. Boone’s Farm Apple Wine.
The men sit in the cold for more than an hour, drinking Jimmy Measles’s hundred-dollar champagne and Monk’s two-dollar wine, urinating over the side of the roof, listening to Jimmy Measles talk.
Michael Flood offers the bag of white powder to Peter, who shakes his head no, and then to Jimmy Measles. Jimmy Measles leans forward until his nose almost touches the blade of Michael’s knife, and then presses one of his nostrils shut and sniffs.
His speech becomes faster and he laughs at his own stories.
Most of them are about the television program Bandstand, the times he got beat up after the show, the times he brought girls into the stage manager’s office.
He thinks of another story but doesn’t tell it. When he left Michael alone in the stage manager’s office with the Jewish girl. He remembers the way she could dance. Maureen.
But that isn’t a story to tell, just one to remember.
He talks about the dances he invented, he and his partner Suze. Half the teenagers in Philadelphia were copying the steps they made up before the show.
“You should of seen the letters I got, asking was I porking her,” he says.
A moment later Jimmy Measles’s lungs seize in the cold air. He reaches into his pants pocket for his atomizer again and puts it into his mouth, taking deep breaths as he pumps the trigger.
Taking this for an intermission, the man called Monk gets up and walks heavily to the edge of the roof. He stands still, his breath fogging the air in fr
ont of his mouth, and then the arch of his piss cuts a line through the light from the streetlamp, and a moment later the other men hear the sound as it hits the sidewalk.
They drink until there are four empty bottles, wine and champagne, in a pile on the roof. Michael Flood sniffs again from the blade of his knife, then holds it for Jimmy Measles.
He doesn’t even offer it to his cousin Peter this time; Peter’s mind is somewhere else.
“You heard Larry Tock ended up in Texas, right?” Jimmy Measles says; the drug rolls through him so he thinks that he does not mind so much being on the roof after all.
Michael and Bobby the Jap look up, waiting, but as Jimmy starts to lay out the last chapter of Larry Tock’s life, he senses that they are waiting for something else.
Jimmy Measles stops his story; no one asks him what happened in Texas. He wishes Michael would offer him something more off the blade of his knife.
Peter stands up then—the first time—and walks to the side of the roof which is protected from the street. Jimmy Measles thinks he has gone there to piss over the side, as the others have. He catches a glint in Michael’s eye.
Back at the edge, Peter Flood looks down, pauses a moment, as if he were having trouble opening his zipper, and then, without saying a word, he jumps off.
Michael Flood walks to the edge of the roof, smiling, and looks into the canyon beyond his feet. It is too dark to see bottom. He knows there is a pile of sand down there as tall as a car, but it doesn’t seem to him that it is much of a cushion in cold weather—now that he considers it, about like hitting a car.
He has never jumped himself, although in the beginning it was his idea.
The others stand up slowly, brushing dirt and grit off their pants.
In the beginning, the cousins came here alone. Peter was fifteen, Michael was a year younger. They quit school together, and Michael’s father, the president by then of the Council of Trade Unions, had gotten them jobs on the docks.
He could get anyone a job; that was the source of the power. The politicians came to him, and the Italians—the ones who owned the streets—left him alone. What they had given away they could not take back.